A study published recently in Nature Sustainability found that Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) could induce forest conservation even after the payments stopped. LEEP Fellow Krister Andersson was the lead author of the study.

To conduct the study, Andersson and his colleagues traveled to 54 villages near tropical forests in Bolivia, Indonesia, Peru, Tanzania, and Uganda and conducted a table top scenario game with the local communities. Forest users were asked to make decisions regarding how many trees they would harvest over several variable stages. The players could potentially earn more than a full day’s pay, based on their decisions.